Baz Stokes (also known as Richard Stokes) is an executive coach, coaching supervisor, team coach, and founder of Triple Loop Development in the UK. He holds ICF and EMCC accreditation and brings over 20 years of experience developing high-performing individuals and teams, including 20 years as a serving RAF helicopter pilot and instructor — developing and supervising military flying instructors at the highest level. He works with senior leaders, teams, and coaches across the public and private sectors.

What is Triple Loop Development?

Triple Loop Development is a UK-based coaching, supervision, and leadership development practice founded and run by Baz Stokes. Services include executive coaching, team coaching, coaching supervision, integrated supervision, leadership development, train the trainer, and manager as coach programmes. Baz Stokes holds ICF and EMCC accreditation.

What is coaching supervision?

Coaching supervision is a collaborative practice where coaches bring their work to a qualified supervisor to reflect, explore, and develop. Unlike mentoring or CPD, it goes into the coach's way of being — the ethics, emotions, and dynamics underneath the client work. It's a space to lower the professional mask and examine what's really happening, not just which technique to use next.

How often should coaches have supervision?

ICF and EMCC both treat regular supervision as a professional standard. Most coaches benefit from monthly or bi-monthly sessions, though the right cadence depends on caseload and complexity. ICF allows up to 10 hours to count towards Core Competency credits for re-credentialing. From 2026, several bodies are formalising it as a mandatory annual CPD requirement.

What is the difference between coaching supervision and coaching mentoring?

Mentoring focuses on skill development and knowledge transfer — the mentor shares expertise to develop the coach's technique. Supervision focuses on the coach's internal world: ethical decisions, blind spots, and relationship with clients. A supervisor holds up a mirror to how you are as a practitioner, not just what you do.

What is integrated supervision for coaches?

Integrated supervision — also called integrative supervision — goes beyond the coaching hour to include a coach's full portfolio: facilitation, training, mentoring, speaking, and consultancy. Many coaches have expanded beyond pure coaching but find traditional supervision only covers the formal coaching work. Integrated supervision creates one reflective space for all of it.

Is coaching supervision required for ICF or EMCC accreditation?

ICF allows up to 10 hours of coaching supervision to count towards Core Competency credits for re-credentialing. EMCC expects credentialled coaches to engage in regular reflective practice. From 2026, some coaching bodies are making supervision a formal annual CPD requirement.

What is executive coaching?

Executive coaching is a 1:1 development process for senior leaders and high-performers facing significant challenges — a transition, a plateau, or a shift in how they need to operate. It's not therapy, training, or mentoring. It's a space to interrogate the assumptions and ways of working that got you here, and explore whether they'll get you to where you're trying to go. Good coaching leaves you thinking differently, not just with a better to-do list.

How is executive coaching different from life coaching?

Life coaching tends to focus on personal goals and overall life direction. Executive coaching focuses on professional performance, leadership, and organisational context — the specific pressures, relationships, and decisions that come with senior roles. A good executive coach understands how organisations actually work, not just how people tick.

How long does executive coaching typically last?

Most executive coaching engagements run over an agreed period — typically 6 to 12 months — rather than a fixed number of sessions. The work is non-linear: some phases need intensity, others need consolidation. Any coach who tells you upfront exactly how many sessions you'll need is guessing.

What is team coaching?

Team coaching is a sustained process that works with a team as a whole system — not just its individual members — to improve how the team thinks, decides, and operates together. It's not a one-day workshop or a team building exercise. It typically runs over 6-12 months, combining team sessions, individual work, and observation of the team in its real operating context.

What is the difference between team coaching and team building?

Team building is typically a one-off event — an offsite, an activity, a day together. The effects are real but short-lived. Team coaching is a sustained engagement that changes how the team operates over time: how they make decisions, surface disagreement, and hold each other accountable. Elite teams don't happen from a single day. They're built over months of deliberate work.

When does a team need coaching rather than training or facilitation?

A team needs coaching when the same problems keep recurring despite previous interventions — when you've had the difficult conversation, changed the ways of working, done the offsite, and it still hasn't shifted. That pattern usually means the issue is in the system, not in any one person. Coaching works on the team's collective way of being, not just their skills or processes.

What is the difference between management training and leadership development?

Management training teaches skills and processes: how to run a 1:1, how to give feedback, how to manage performance. Leadership development goes deeper — it works on identity, mindset, and the shift in how someone needs to operate as they take on greater scope and complexity. Both matter. Most organisations invest heavily in management training and under-invest in the deeper leadership work.

What is the manager to leader transition and why is it so hard?

The manager to leader transition is one of the most disorienting professional shifts there is. You've spent your career being rewarded for being excellent at doing the thing — and then you get promoted, and suddenly the thing isn't the job anymore. The instincts that made you successful now pull you back toward doing rather than leading. The work of leadership development at this level isn't learning new skills — it's letting go of the identity of the expert.

What is a train the trainer programme?

A train the trainer programme develops the people in your organisation who have deep expertise in something into people who can teach that expertise to others. It's not presentation skills training. The hardest part of teaching is understanding what you know well enough to explain it — surfacing the tacit knowledge that experts have internalised to the point they've forgotten they know it.

Who is train the trainer designed for?

Train the trainer is for organisations that have expertise in-house but rely on external providers to deliver training — and for the subject matter experts who want to develop their ability to pass on what they know. It's also for people who already train but want to go deeper: moving from teaching the what, to teaching the why underneath it.

What makes train the trainer different from presentation skills training?

Presentation skills training makes someone more confident and polished in front of a room. Train the trainer goes much further: understanding how adults learn, designing content that transfers not just informs, giving feedback that improves performance rather than just describing it, and teaching people to teach in ways that pass on understanding — not just information. An expert who can present their knowledge fluently is not yet a trainer.

What does 'manager as coach' mean?

'Manager as coach' means developing managers to use coaching approaches in their leadership — resisting the urge to solve, asking better questions, and creating conditions where their team arrives at their own clarity. It doesn't mean turning managers into coaches. It means helping them resist the habits that got them promoted — the expertise, the problem-solving reflex — when those habits stop serving their team.

Does a manager need coaching qualifications to be coach-like?

No. Manager as coach programmes teach coaching principles and skills — not the full training required to hold professional coaching relationships. After a manager as coach programme, a manager will be more coach-like in their leadership. They will not be qualified to coach in the professional sense, and shouldn't position themselves as a coach to their direct reports.

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